Red Hat: Xen virtualization tech not ready for prime time
According to ZDNet Australia's Renai LeMay:
The Xen open-source virtualization environment is not yet ready for enterprise use, a senior Red Hat executive has said, despite "unbelievable" customer demand and the fact that Novell has already started shipping the software....while Novell this month started shipping the software with version 10 of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server environment, Red Hat continues to have a lack of confidence in the virtualization newcomer, said Alex Pinchev, a vice president of international operations at the software company...."XenSource is not stable yet, it's not ready for the enterprise," Pinchev told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet Australia on Monday...."We don't feel that XenSource is stable enough to address banking, telco or any other enterprise customer, so until we are comfortable, we will not release it," he added.
The story goes onto say that Red Hat may very well be cooking up its own virtual machine technology but doesn't provide the details. For example, might it be leveraging some or all of an existing hypervisor technology at its core with Red Hat specific elements as the supporting cast of characters?
Instead of trying to play catch-up with rival Novell and simply shipping Xen as included software with its operating system, Red Hat will attempt to build a full virtualization platform around the product in the next version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server software, due to be released in December....That platform will include software for storage virtualization, for example, as well as systems management and provisioning tools, Pinchev said. He noted there was an "unbelievable" demand for virtualization software from customers.
The market can hardly afford another hypervisor technology given the headcount of them in the market already, causing confusion. Intel has hypervisor code for its virtualization-ready chips. AMD probably does too (although, unlike the rest of their technologies, the two are incompatible). Both companies are looking to see their virtualization technologies get accepted by the market over the other's, so it stands to reason that they've already been working pretty closely with all the OS vendors, Red Hat included.